HD 28185: An Elite Odyssey

The first time I went to Los Angeles, what struck me was how this place I'd never been to in all my life could be so damn familiar. We see things on our screens and we read them on our pages, and while it's no substitute for experiencing a place with your own senses unmediated by anything, sometimes it's the only way we can make these journeys. As a science fiction writer, that's particularly the case for me--it's unlikely I'll ever leave Earth, and telling stories of far-off places is the best we can hope for. Even knowing these places are real can be staggering enough sometimes: last year I had the opportunity to view Saturn through a telescope, and my first thought on seeing those rings was "my god, it really does look like that."

One place I've visited twice now in print is the HD 28185 system, 138 light-years away in the constellation Eridanus; fourteen years ago we detected a gas giant orbiting in its habitable zone, and it's around that gas giant I've placed Esperanza, setting of the stories "The Paragon of Animals" in the March 2013 issue of Analog and "The Badges of Her Grief" in its March 2015 issue, which is available now--and you should totally go out and get it! It's a place that feels familiar now, though it's also a place I could never visit.

At least, I couldn't until Elite: Dangerous came out. This space flying-trading-pirating-exploring sim, the latest expression of a thirty-year franchise that goes back to vector graphics on the BBC Micro, is set in a one-to-one reproduction of the Milky Way and its four hundred billion stars. For now, it's also likely to be the closest I'll get to exploring the galaxy. With that in mind, given the occasion of "The Badges of Her Grief" seeing print, I went on a "short" pilgrimage to HD 28185--or as it's known in-game, HIP 20723, as E:D seems to have a serious love for the Hipparcos catalogue.

Well, as short as anything measured in light-years can be.

It wasn't THAT much of an odyssey, though. From my home base at Big Harry's Monkey Hangout* in the Jotunheim system, it was a trip of 158 light-years, with a brief stopover in the Ongkuma system to investigate the short-lived slave rebellion there. Seeing as how ships in E:D are capable of flying faster-than-light in normal space due to the magical frameshift drive--a technical necessity for a multiplayer game that, nonetheless, makes me feel dirty--and my Adder can cross 15 light-year gulfs in as many seconds, it was the work of an evening. I didn't even have to leave human space; to my regret, I discovered that HD 28185 is part of the Empire, the requisite society of neo-Roman assbutts that maintains slavery in the 34th century to remind us that they're a bunch of jerks.

It's not even a particularly interesting system. I was hoping to find things that would fire my imagination--perhaps even an Earthlike planet! What I found would be nothing to write home about if this was any other system--an asteroid belt close to the star and a rocky, ringed world with sulphur dioxide air, a 182 degree surface temperature, and a lonely orbital mining platform above, and at the edge of the system that I could detect, the gas giant HD 28185 b. Only in the stories I write is it called Corazon.

Not much, is it? Not even so much as a moon. I mean, I was hoping that it would at least have rings. Nevertheless--it had a feeling of reality to it. It's a world we know is out there. It's a place we can speculate about, and in this small way, I can see its face.

I'll be back there again, for future stories. For now, I like knowing that it's out there to be found.

* Which, incidentally, sounds like the sort of name the Culture would give to a space station. So far, it is only rivalled in-game by Norman-Mavis's Bingo Palace and Lucy Young's Orbital Happy Home.